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How Can You Use Digital Marketing To Your Existing Customers?

bookmark_borderKevin Laytonaccess_timeThursday, January 25th

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How Can You Use Digital Marketing To Your Existing Customers?

Marketers love their customers. So much so that they want more, more, more. The trouble is, if you put too much focus on acquiring new customers, you may forget about the ones you already have. Take a look at how you allocate your digital marketing resources. There's a good chance that most of your efforts (and money) go to finding new customers. Of course, finding new customers is extremely important but not at the expense of your best sales prospects–the people that already know you.

As you develop your digital marketing plan for the new year, putting a laser-like focus on how you approach your existing customer base is critical. Your strategy should be geared toward how you hold on to these customers, and how you get them to continue to buy from you and become your best advocates.

The most important trend in digital marketing right now is personalization. That means you'll need to dig into your toolbox to find the resources that will help you target your marketing to anticipate your customer's needs. Since you already know your existing customers, you've got a head start. They are using your website, your social media, and you probably have them in your CRM.

To understand how these tools work, think about your personal social media feed. Have you noticed ads for products you have recently searched for? If so, then you already know how targeting works.

Geotargeting helps you target your advertising based on the location of your customers. You can target the specific geographic area your business is in, or an area where your product is likely to be a hit (if you sell snow boots, you're probably not going to geotarget Hawaii, for example).

IP address targeting helps you segment even more closely than geotargeting–it uses the geographic location of a specific IP address. You can detect the location of someone using your website based on their IP address. You can associate an IP address to an individual, which means you can collect information about their search history and internet use in order to create a more personalized ad for that individual.

Social retargeting takes advantage of the data collected by social platforms to allow you to select your audience. By matching your customer list to existing users, you can determine who will see your ads. Social targeting is valuable not only for advertising but for launching referral or loyalty campaigns.

Display/banner retargeting targets an audience based on sales history, location and search history. With this type of retargeting, you are delivering personalized advertising message to your customers, encouraging them to buy again, upgrade, or add additional features. For example, if someone visits your website and makes a purchase, you can retarget them with an ad encouraging them to come back and buy again.

So how do you decide which retargeting tool (or tools) is right for you? This will depend on your products, your customers, your resources, and your goals. Like any marketing technique, developing the potential of retargeting will require a combination of art and science. You can increase your odds of success by knowing your audience and testing to see which combination works the best. If you keep sound marketing principles in mind like segmenting your audience, following your brand strategy and crafting strong calls to action, retargeting will help you stand out from the crowd and make the most of the group that knows you best, your existing customers.